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Unusual Source-Driven Adventure Game MODs
bengal0 writes "Two new HL2 mods created in six months by graduating students at the
Guildhall at SMU are available for download.
Both games are single player adventure games, with mouse-driven interfaces focusing on exploration and puzzle solving. Weekday Warrior is a comical game set in an office environment, in which a bored office worker daydreams to escape his normal life. In Shantytown, a girl and her robot companion explore a towering, futuristic city in search of a way to stop the trash that is falling on her house. BitTorrent links: Weekday Warrior, Shantytown."
I just recently started playing half-life two and it's freaken amazing. The gameplay possibilities with that engine is pretty awesome. The water hazard among other portions of the game were simply amazing. It was refreshing to play such an immersive, realistic, and fun game. Then came ravenholme which was almost like survival horror games and gameplay was improved through the use of the gravity gun. Nothing like smashing zombies by picking up ordinary stuff on the ground.
I've been to dissapointed as of late with numerous highly rated titles (God of war for the ps2, that game is freaken awful, nice graphics but it gets old watching your avatar take 2-3 seconds on the same cool move 200 times a level).
Hmmm... Pie...
...those e-mail viruses that send .COM programs to trick people into thinking it's a .com Web site... got to love Microsoft, eh?
.com extension years before the web was a gleam in anyone's eye. You should blame the person that came up with the .com domain while knowing full well it could eventually be a problem. I guess we can be thankful a .exe domain wasn't created.
Not that I care for Microsoft but you can't blame them, they had the
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Have you looked at the Source engine, and Half-Life 2's source code in particular?
The Source engine is popular among modders for two reasons: accessibility and history. People saw the likes of CS and DOD come out from the HL1 engine, and generally assumed that the Source engine would be just as easily moddable. For the most part they are wrong.
Having seen source code for Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2K4 (though not the C++ source, the UScript source), I can say that HL2's code is 100% pure spaghetti. The design is atrocious, obfuscated, and a royal pain to work with. By comparison Quake 3's straightforward code is a godsend, and UScript's strict OO design, while not 100% intuitive, at least makes logical sense. HL2's code has neither.
What HL2 does have in droves is existing artistic content that is generic enough to be adaptable to most mods' needs, where Q3 and UT fail. But from a code perspective, Source is in short, a really stinking piece of crap. Sure it runs and looks cool, but you haven't seen pain until you've had to work with it. Ugh. Documentation is practically non-existent, and Valve's wiki, while commendable, is quite inadequate. HL2's code was hodge-podged together to WORK, and that it does, but take a look at a well-designed engine like Q3 and UT, both of which where designed to be extensible above all else, and you realize what a turd Source is.
As for companies demanding Source experience: there are only a small handful of Source licensees. I would argue it's FAR more useful to know the Unreal engine, given that it has a VASTLY greater number of licensees - and has for a long time. Even discounting already-published games, UE2 and the upcoming UE3 together (or even apart) have a much greater domination of studios than Source can shake a stick at.
That said, I would personally discourage students form getting too tied up with any one particular engine. The dominant 3rd-party engines in the industry are all, for the most part, well designed and learnable. To tie yourself to a particular engine is to doom yourself as a lowly scripter. A game coder needs to go far beyond scripting, and more in-line with general development and theory. There is a lot more to game code than mere feature implementation that is involved in light modding.